by Chris Petit
‘Another torso. Fresh. What do we make of that?’
It was like the first body. Butchered, rendered inhuman. Schlegel stared, thinking how Morgen had predicted the killings would carry on.
‘Where was it found?’
‘In the middle of Alexanderplatz, if you please, in a sack, by a Polish street cleaner, at six in the morning. Three days ago. In the rain.’
Schlegel looked at Gersten. ‘Meaning it was someone other than Lazarenko.’
‘I was talking to the Todermann woman the other day, saying I thought it was turning into a killing virus. It could be a copycat.’
‘Do you have any idea who?’
‘I have my theory.’
‘Boot’s on the other foot now,’ said Gersten. ‘You’re the one answering.’
They were in the usual room above the river. Gersten picked up a file and waved it.
‘Interesting reading.’
What little was left of Schlegel’s spirits sank.
‘Heady days. Summer of ’41. Bezirk Bialystok. Everyone on the charge. Gateway to the east. Big skies, golden corn, enemy on the run. From what I understand your boss Nebe, who commanded your brigade, was a bit of a slacker when it came to anti-partisan duties. And so it seems were you. A bit of a Pinko even. Refused to roll up your sleeves and get your hands dirty. Conscientious objector?’
‘Such operations were on a voluntary basis.’
‘And there were more than enough volunteers?’
‘There seemed to be.’
‘And what did anti-partisan duties consist of?’
‘Mopping-up operations behind the front line.’
‘In detail.’
‘We liaised with military intelligence in pinpointing areas of resistance.’
‘You took the war to the civilian population.’
‘Only when it was shown to have been penetrated by the resistance.’
‘How long did you last?’
‘I was sent home after a couple of months.’
‘Any particular reason?’
‘I believe mental fatigue was what the record stated.’
‘Again, any particular reason?’
He had been a staff officer working for Nebe. From a distance, the operations had sounded as plausible as he had described to Gersten. Covering ground, venturing into the badlands to engage with partisans in the heady days of the big eastern expansion. Many of the brigade were police reservists, older men, not kids, ordinary. He wrote up the operational reports, making them sound like military duties undertaken in response to resistance atrocity. The partisans were compared to Red Indians because of the same crude practice of mutilation, including scalping. Schlegel remembered many accounts similar to ones cited by Lazarenko. Partisans took no prisoners and anyone who fell into their hands died a gruesome death. The first corpses he saw were the charred bodies of three airmen who had been caught and barbecued alive. They were shown filmed evidence of atrocities by an enemy considered endlessly cunning, relentless and unguessable. Children and old women were just as likely to carry grenades. Children were initiated to kill from as young as ten or eleven. During periods of famine they resorted to eating each other, and any enemy regularly had his liver cut out and eaten as a way of stealing his soul.
It was impossible to describe the sense of bewitched trepidation that lay over them.
Schlegel suspected he was a coward. Nebe had encouraged him to go. He was putting together a police force to keep order behind the lines in what was called bandit country. It would be designated as active duty and they would all get a pay hike.
The thought of anything resembling military duty and the possibility of shooting and being shot at appalled Schlegel. He squared with his conscience by telling himself they were going as a policing force, operating in conquered territory and little active work would be required. Everyone said it would be like Poland, a known slacker’s posting.
He wangled a staff job.
Then the reports started coming in of men cracking up.
A team of shrinks turned up.
Schlegel talked to a smooth, dark-haired one called Krick. Afterwards Schlegel decided Krick must have confused him with someone else. Talks between staff and shrinks were always informal, usually done over a drink. Krick, sympathetic and off the record after many beers, said to Schlegel, ‘You have a bitch of a job. First, don’t order anyone to do it. Ask for volunteers and if anyone has a problem send them to me. The trick is to normalise the process. Weed out the thugs and sadists and make it scientific and technical, and don’t discriminate against or punish those who say they have no stomach for the job. Plenty will.’
Schlegel was accused by a sergeant of being a shirker. They were both wildly drunk, as was the norm. Schlegel was within his rights to have the man cashiered. The sergeant couldn’t care less. He said he could hit Schlegel and have done with it. Eighteen months in a penal colony would be a holiday by comparison.
The facts were cleaned up in the paperwork. A bureaucratic structure was created, with official notations, workshops, directives and mandated progress reports (‘Such and such an area cleared of partisan activities’). Civilian consultants came in, bringing a pretence of management, and the shrinks’ gloss provided earnest exhortation of the dire necessity of the task.
Order did not extend to the field. The drunken sergeant challenged Schlegel to accompany them instead of hiding behind his desk.
Schlegel remembered the journey, a two-hour drive, sitting in the front of the Kübelwagen, wearing goggles because of the dust, the landscape ahead like a child’s drawing of a huge cloudless sky bisecting endless plain, and them racing unchallenged down open roads. He was there as an observer, and that made him unpopular, being there to watch others do the dirty work.
They rounded up an entire village, made some dig an enormous ditch while the rest waited, forced them all to undress, then shot the lot, carefully positioned on the lip of the ditch so their bodies tumbled into the vast makeshift grave.
Officers were not present.
‘You will drink a lot of schnapps tonight,’ said the sergeant.
A regular round of gunfire came from the site, two hundred metres away.
‘You will have to take a closer inspection for your report,’ the sergeant said.
They went down at the end. Schlegel had expected to be faced with something finished and somehow orderly, the neat result of a job properly done. The swarm of flies that had gathered above the pit was dispersed by a sudden geyser of blood spraying like a hydrant. Although he had heard shooting all afternoon he was still shocked by the extent of the sea of bodies, like marble streaked with dirt, the flesh unnaturally white against tanned necks and hands. Some remained alive, writhing.
Stunned, he clambered down the side of the ditch, falling and landing among the bodies. He struggled to stand, knee-deep in viscera, thinking of himself as finishing the job – pistol to neck, eyes shut, pull trigger – walking on corpses, standing in pools of blood, reloading with shaking hands. After a beseeching look from a woman who raised both hands, he turned away and fired, hoping he had put her out of her misery. There was just him in the pit and no one watching. Later he tried to remember how many magazines. The sergeant told him four. More than thirty rounds. No one helped him out and several times he slid back down. What he had done would turn him into some mad dog or pariah. Such a hot day. He smelled his bitter sweat, cordite, shit and vomit, the waft of cigarettes on the breeze, a metal taste in his mouth, like he had been sucking coins. Then came a sudden rainstorm, what the tough sergeant surprisingly called the heavens weeping. The men filled in the ditch and they drove home drinking beer, brought with them for the occasion. They got Schlegel legless that night and from then on he counted as one of them.
He reasoned he had acted in the most humane way in an impossible situation. His body told him otherwise. His hair went white in the time it took to send him home, bleached by the sun he thought, until he saw himself properly in
a mirror, which was not a feature of life in the field.
He attended his desk. He knew he was cracking up. He attacked a fellow officer in the mess with a brass candlestick. He spent a deranged week where he insisted on attaching himself to a mobile shooting unit and watched everything. He lay in bed for a week in a trance until sent home for psychiatric observation. Knowing that Nebe was less than keen in his pursuit of their orders, and they had managed to save thousands of civilians from execution by falsifying figures and claiming credit for shootings that had never been carried out counted for nothing in Schlegel’s mind.
‘Torture is a strangely intimate business,’ observed Gersten, then hurried to reassure Schlegel. ‘Oh, don’t worry, I don’t have that in mind for you.’
The room to which he was now taken was almost a mirror of his office, with a blank wall outside and crack of sunlight that lasted twenty minutes as it moved across. After their third or fourth session, as Gersten liked to call them, Schlegel noticed he seemed to be brought there to coincide with the brief passage of light.
Sometimes they appeared to talk about nothing of consequence although Schlegel supposed what passed for gossip on a variety of subjects such as Stoffel and Nebe and the quality of canteen food came down to information gathering.
‘These bodies,’ said Gersten. ‘How do you see them?’
‘Which specifically?’
‘Let’s start with the old woman who was murdered for the princely sum of one mark.’
‘Lampe confessed to that.’
‘Who confesses and who commits is not necessarily the same thing.’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Fine detective you are.’
‘I work in the financial division.’
‘Ah, yes, forged money. Who in your opinion killed Abbas?’
‘Whoever Abbas as your agent was meant to betray.’
‘And who was that, in your opinion?’
‘A man who calls himself Grigor whose real name isYakov Zorin.’
‘A Jew?’
‘A forger.’
‘You know more than I do. Go on.’
‘He appears to have been sent away. Or perhaps he faked it to look that way.’
‘And the woman with money stuffed up her hole?’
‘Zorin or Grigor, or whatever you like to call him, posed as a waiter to pick her up.’
‘Call him Grigor. It has a ring of Dostoyevsky. Have you identified the dead woman?’
‘No, but if she was your agent we were negligent not to check with you.’
‘The thing is, I have no idea who she was.’
He showed his open hand to say he had nothing to hide. Schlegel thought it sounded believable, although Sybil was being used for an identical entrapment.
Gersten made light of that, saying the arrangement was nothing unusual.
‘You seem quite pally with her. I am bound to ask whether you are a Jew lover on the quiet.’
‘She witnessed the Metzler shooting.’
Gersten sighed. ‘Let’s not get lost in that particular thicket. What I can’t decide is whether Grigor is responsible for the butcher murders.’
‘You wrote those off to Lazarenko.’
‘I mean in cahoots, as part of some ghastly tandem cooked up by the Jewish Grigor – who from his name must have Russian connections – and the Bolshevik Lazarenko. We assume a man who cuts off another’s cock is capable of anything. What do you think?’
‘What I think is not important.’
‘What would Morgen say? Where is Morgen, by the way?’
‘Gone.’
‘I must say I found him a terrifying combination of dark horse and fierce dog. How do you find him?’
‘All I can say for certain is he smoked a lot and has been to Russia.’
‘And Morgen on the killings?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘There’s a lot of not knowing with you.’
‘He would say something metaphysical, such as the murders forming part of the same volcanic upheaval, whether physically related or not.’
‘A bit deep for me, but with Lazarenko gone who are we naming for this latest butcher’s murder?’
‘Grigor must be part of the network. If there is a counter-propaganda element it’s important they carry on.’
‘Are you saying the killings themselves are more the point than the identity of the killer?’
‘It seems.’
Gersten smiled and said, ‘To get metaphysical for a moment, then it doesn’t matter who the actual killer is. He can be whoever we say he is.’
‘Didn’t that happen already?’
‘Touché. Except the urgency is becoming overstretched in terms of a solution. We live in a world of results. Two years ago no one would have cared about some shitty little terror campaign, but with the army not chalking up victories, this takes us into another dimension. Ministers are starting to jump. Everyone is terrified Adolf will get to hear.’
Gersten studied his hand and said in the absence of Grigor he would have to come up with someone else.
‘It’s a hungry monster we feed. I abhor this new fashion for the quick fix, but let’s say we set you up in a soft camp, on the quiet. You can be a librarian. I could arrange to have you driven there, save you that degrading business of going by train.’
Schlegel was left struggling to absorb that Gersten was about not only write off the new flayed body to him, he was about make him disappear altogether.
Gersten held up his hand, amused. ‘I know. A lot to take in.’
Schlegel saw how much he had brought to the table in terms of framing himself. A history of delinquency and recidivism. The disturbed background. Evidence of participation in traumatic shootings that Gersten would claim had messed up his head. Psychiatric reports. Lack of spine. The fugue state of the last days. He was being fitted up as effectively as Lampe and Lazarenko.
‘Your motive is the only thing that worries me.’
When Schlegel angrily responded there was none, Gersten lazily pointed out he was bound to say that.
‘I think you buckled under pressure.’ He rubbed his thumb and forefinger. ‘That crack or fissure in the brain, working away, turning to self-loathing, until you cannot live with yourself, so you find a substitute that lets you both relive and exorcise the trauma. I am starting to sound quite philosophical.’
He reached into a drawer.
‘I have forgers too. Jewish ones who work for me. Good, but not as good as Grigor. I had these done for my amusement.’
It was a Jewish identity card for Abbas, except instead of Abbas’s photograph was the mugshot they had taken of Schlegel.
‘As I say, done as a stunt, until I thought . . .’ He reached into the drawer again. ‘We could turn you into Grigor.’
Schlegel’s face was now on a Jewish card that stated he was Yakov Zorin.
He realised Gersten had known all along about Zorin.
‘Profession, butcher. I rather like that touch.’
Gersten leaned forward, his contempt clear. ‘I don’t give a fuck what profession Grigor really has, he is what I say he is and so are you. The person known as August Schlegel will quite disappear. Soon there will be nothing to say you aren’t Grigor or Abbas, or whatever wretched part I decide you should play. Nothing like this had crossed my mind until they brought you in, paperless and out of your head. Your office was about to report you missing. Do you see what I am saying?’ He snapped his fingers. ‘The thing about you, Schlegel, is you are a classic victim. Maybe because you shot Jews and felt bad you thought you had to become like one, which was why you took to wandering around with no papers, asking to get caught.’ Gersten snorted. ‘Your circumcision doesn’t help. Why on earth take a knife to a kid’s cock, what’s that about? The shockingness of your condition when they brought you in made me embarrassed for you. You stank so much we had to hose you down. Don’t you remember?’
Schlegel shook his head.
‘Anyway, you
kept asking for me; not wise under the circumstances. And anyway again, be grateful we cleaned you up rather than let you live with your depravity. Do you see what I am saying? I would have been professionally negligent had I not made the observation that here was a man capable of anything.’
‘This is ridiculous. I want to talk to Nebe.’
‘Why should he care? Camps are full of people who thought they would never disappear. Statistically those at the top of the alphabet have a better chance of survival. Less standing around in the freezing cold waiting for your name to be called. As Zorin you would fare less well than Abbas.’
‘In a soft camp?’
‘There are no soft camps. Not really.’
49
Sybil still had the key to the back stairs up to Alwynd’s apartment. She knew which days he left around ten and didn’t come back for lunch. She would tell Stella about a place where Jews were hiding, luring her to where Grigor would be waiting.
In trying to match Stella’s understanding of everything as power and control, Sybil knew she risked being trapped between her, Gersten and Grigor, all of them predators. She had loitered around Stella for the best part of an evening, waiting for her to pick up the scent. In the women’s washroom Sybil told her story breathlessly, sounding excited at the prospect of the trap while trying to create the right atmosphere of intimacy.
‘You have such beautiful clothes.’
She played the same game with Grigor, letting him kiss her, saying they had to be prepared like hardened professionals. ‘Later,’ she promised.
In a world of such shifting alliances, she sided with whomever she was with. She suspected Gersten would kill her if he learned she was about to betray Stella. She suspected Gersten would kill her anyway, given half a chance. She was smart enough to see she was offering Stella to Grigor as a substitute for herself. Stella she had to pretend to fall a little bit in love with, blanking Lore from her mind.
Gersten was hardest. She told him Grigor was susceptible.
‘Let’s play the long game. I am rather enjoying the idea of my little agent in an act of deep penetration.’
